5 Favorite Tips From Famous UX Experts

I attended and spoke at the Virtual conference from Rosenfeld Media today “31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips”. Each speaker presented their favorite user experience tips. I took one tip from each of the speakers as my favorite. Here they are:

Steve Krug — Test your competition/comparables. Before you choose a design path or design idea, find someone else who is doing it and run a user test of their site/app/product. That way you can see what works and what doesn’t before you even start your design.

Whitney Quesenbery — Many of the best designs we all use started out as products designed for accessibility, for example, rolling mail carts for postal delivery people (started off being used by women since it wasn’t believed they could carry a heavy load) and Good Grips tools from OXO (started as special tools for people with arthritis, but now they are just known as well-designed tools).

Jeffrey Eisenberg — Instead of designing to fit your selling process and selling cycle, design instead to fit the customer’s BUYING process and buying cycle. These are not the same thing.

Aaron Walter — Stop designing in Photoshop. Use something like Bootstrap where you can see what things really look like and you can concentrate on the “system” not the “page”.

Luke Wroblewski — 75% of people using smartphone apps are using one thumb — Have you designed for one thumb use?

It was a GREAT day of learning. It was hard to just pick one from each!

As we’ve noticed with some of the new smartphones ( samsung for example & even the new iphone 5), the screens are getting bigger/longer. Do we expect users to start using 2 fingers more than just their thumb? The bigger the screen the harder it is to reach areas at the top of the screen ( such as navigation).